In recent years, a vast increase in public and private utilization of mobile electronic communication has occurred. As use of mobile communication devices and mobile communications services increase, the demand placed on mobile network components to provide remote communication services for such devices and subscribers increases commensurately. To compound this problem, today's mobile devices (e.g., mobile phones, personal digital assistants [PDAs], etc.) can be utilized as full-service computing mechanisms. For example, many of the most recent and advanced mobile devices can be associated with word processing software, web browsing software, electronic mail software, accounting software, and various other types of software. In general, applications heretofore available only by way of computing devices and/or Internet protocol (IP) based network devices are now available on such mobile devices. This expansion in capability of mobile devices has also lead to advancements in processing capability of mobile network resources. As an example, mobile base stations and control components have begun to process voice and data traffic concurrently on a single processing architecture.
Rapid growth of the telecommunications industry has fueled a strong competition for market share in mobile-IP communication devices and communication service plans. Because of such competition, mobile network providers have created packet based data networks that can provide IP access to the Internet and other IP-based network resources and applications (e.g., e-mail, web browsing, and so on). Accordingly, a mobile handset, or a like device, can provide access to a rich assortment of shared computing applications and data resources available via such networks. However, not all packet based data communications utilize a common data rate or common quality of service. On the contrary, various service providers provide for a range of bandwidths or data rates for IP-based subscriber traffic.
In addition to the foregoing, communication link quality and data rate reliability requirements can vary from application to application. For instance, web-browsing traffic is often provided as a best effort service; available bandwidth is allocated to such traffic, but where high traffic volume occurs less bandwidth is allocated to such traffic. In contrast, some applications, including streaming audio or video, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), and the like, perform best when a constant data rate and low channel jitter is provided. Accordingly, service providers often provide highly reliable or guaranteed data rates for such applications.
Due to the various requirements of different applications, some mobile providers maintain different wireless carriers for different types of traffic. However, this can be inefficient in circumstances where call volume as a function of application type is difficult to predict. Accordingly, other mobile service provides integrate wireless carriers to handle various applications concurrently. Thus, in such carriers, circuit-switched calls and packet-switched data calls, of varying bandwidths, data rates, link quality, and so on, can be serviced by a single carrier. Although such an arrangement can provide added efficiency, additional management requirements can also arise.